My thoughts on Cognitive Development

Initially I believed that most aspects of functioning and understanding life were learned more than innate. The material we have looked at so far has made me reanalyze my thoughts of cognitive development. The class hasn’t made me change my initial thought completely but it has allowed me to evolve from it. Not only is learning very important to cognitive development but so are the innate abilities that help us process our learning. What this class has taught me (at least the way I interpret it) is that our brains supply us with essential tools, and our environment helps us utilize those tools that enable our process of thought and perception to evolve. The evolution of our thoughts leads to the ability for complex problem solving and reasoning. Since we have some innate abilities that help us learn, the more we exercise them the easier it becomes to process.
An example of this would be the study by Pescalis, 2005, (discussed in class) where infants were exposed to faces of different monkeys over a long period of time allowing them to become experts in distinguishing monkey faces. Another example on the other end of the spectrum is the story of the feral child Genie. Genie was subjected to severe confinement with no social interaction and spent nearly all her life tied to toilet in the basement of her families home. She wasn’t discovered until the age of thirteen. Genie lost most of her ability to speak or even physically function. Many say this is due to the fact that she was never exposed to very important social aspects of life as she developed into a teenager. Both these examples show the importance of taking advantage of what our innate cognitive processes have to offer us and exercising those abilities through learning and early exposure.
A personal example of my own cognitive development that I could vividly recall was when I was around the age of six and constantly arguing with my parents that plants were not alive like people were. I couldn’t grasp the idea that plants could be alive simply because I associated being alive as having feelings and talking or at least having a heart- beat. This is evidence that I went through Paiget’s stages of assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration, when I finally realized that not all living things share the same characteristics. So far this class has exposed me to many different views of cognitive development, the two main classifications being innate or learned. The more I consider both sides the more I believe that it is a combination of both. Piaget’s experiments and outcomes can be interpreted many different ways but so can Spelkes ideas. The difficulty with studying cognitive development is that the subjects (babies and children) cannot accurately tell you what they are feeling or what they are thinking. This situation leaves most of the results of cognitive development involving children to behavioral observation. In the end this makes for very interesting results because it allows researchers to learn different aspects of cognitive development because there is an advantage of being able to see it from many different viewpoints.